


My Immortal

by Joel7th



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Body Horror, Dark, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 18:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3218939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joel7th/pseuds/Joel7th
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Say my name.”</p><p>It breathed into his mind like a breeze, the command. He obeyed. “Nicolas.”</p><p>A pair of arms twined around Lestat’s neck. The arms was white, ghostly white in a way that the moon’s pale shade appeared livelier, and the skin almost transparent as light, little as it was in this dark room, passed right through to the flesh and bone. However, they were undeniably beautiful as they were grievously lacking: where the hands should be to complete this eerie artwork were only two blood-crusted lumps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Immortal

 

 

> I’m so tired of being here, suppressed by all my childish fears
> 
> And if you have to leave, I wish that you would just leave
> 
> Your presence still lingers here and it won’t leave me alone
> 
> These wounds won’t seem to heal, this pain is just too real
> 
> There’s just too much that time cannot erase
> 
> When you cried, I’d wipe away all of your tears
> 
> When you’d scream, I’d fight away all of your fears
> 
> And I held your hand through all of these years
> 
> But you still have all of me
> 
> You used to captivate me by your resonating light
> 
> Now, I’m bound by the life you left behind
> 
> Your face it haunts my once pleasant dreams
> 
> Your voice it chased away all the sanity in me
> 
> These wounds won’t seem to heal, this pain is just too real
> 
> There’s just too much that time cannot erase
> 
> When you cried, I’d wipe away all of your tears
> 
> When you’d scream, I’d fight away all of your fears
> 
> And I held your hand through all of these years
> 
> But you still have all of me
> 
> I’ve tried so hard to tell myself that you’re gone
> 
> But though you’re still with me, I’ve been alone all along
> 
> When you cried, I’d wipe away all of your tears
> 
> When you’d scream, I’d fight away all of your fears
> 
> And I held your hand through all of these years
> 
> But you still have all of me, me, me
> 
> **Evanescence**

—

“Lestat, do we ever suffer from illness, us vampires?”

Lestat turned away from the laptop screen to the sight of his beloved’s face grimacing in a silent pain, his right hand clutching his chest.

“Louis, you look dreadful,” Lestat said, a deep concern manifesting in a crease between his elegant eyebrows.

It should amuse him that he had once spoken the exact words to Louis once-upon-a-night, when his lover, after hours of brooding, once again questioned him about the nature of their unholy species. In a half-amused, half-mocking tone he had commented on Louis’s expression, just to spite the man he loved more than his arrogant, egotistical self but couldn’t help antagonizing now and then.

Now he said them again, free of mocking and sarcasm.

A soft, bitter laugh. “Do I?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, really,” Louis replied. “It’s just once in a while I have this sort of pain in my chest, beneath my rib. Most of the times it’s faint, like a baby’s hand touching my heart, squeezing it a little bit. Rarely does it become intense so I try to ignore it and wait for it to fade away eventually. It never lasts too long; nor is it unbearable.”

“Why did you not tell me earlier?” He snapped at his lover, startling the latter.

The green eyes he was so enamored with widened, staring at him with a subtle hint of hurt. The moment was brief, and they lowered, seemingly contemplating the checkered tiles. His thick eyelashes were the blackest ink smeared on white marble, the sheer beauty a butterfly knife slicing into his heart.

“Right. Because I wasn’t with you…” he whispered, the volume of his voice amounting to the sound of snow falling. He wasn’t sure if the other immortal was able to hear him.

Lestat signed – a mortal habit – and pressed his palms against the cool, smooth flesh of Louis’s cheeks. Holding his face, he touched him with his forehead, a gesture endearing to their time together in the past. Then he captured his lover’s lips with his own, a gentle, chaste but lingering kiss, breathing in warm breath. He smiled against the kiss, feeling his beautiful one’s shy yet eager respond to his affection.

He leaned back, smoothing the crease between dark eyebrows with the pad of his thumb. “Serve you right for eating unhealthily for the first few years of your immortal life,” he chastised, not harshly.

“I brought this upon myself, huh?”

“No, I’m shitting you.”

The green orbs stared at him incredulously.

“Means I’m joking, this age’s slang.” He smiled. “Vampires don’t get sick. Long ago they might, the sort of spontaneous combustion you read in my autobiography, but not now, not with us.”

His hands moved down to the other’s neck, idly playing with the hair at the back of his head. “You haven’t fed properly, is all,” he said. “Go now, find some healthy-looking mortals and don’t return until you’re bloated with warm blood.”

“You aren’t going?” Louis asked. Slowly rising to his feet, he was hesitant to depart from Lestat’s affectionate ministrations.

How he missed the nights they went side by side, hunting together. Two Lucifer’s angels on the loose as Lestat had dubbed them. One forever incomplete without his significant other.

“Tomorrow night,  _mon cher_ ,” he promised. Grabbing a leather coat – his coat – on the coat stand, he draped it over Louis’s shoulders, helped him get into it and fixed his hair and garment to perfection. “I have a few matters to consult Marius. Just go,  _je t’aime.”_

He stole a quick peck on the brunette’s lips and ushered him to the door. “No rats, OK?” he called out, and grinned at his beloved’s dirty look in reply.

The grin died out along with Louis’s sight.

…

Locking the door, he retreated to their bedroom, where darkness claimed sovereignty and light, coming through cracks on the tight-shut French window, was its submissive servant. To the darkness he whispered, voice soft like a prayer, “Tell me what’s happening.”

No answer.

He repeated the words more earnestly, more urgently.

Still silence.

“Say my name.”

It breathed into his mind like a breeze, the command. He obeyed. “Nicolas.”

A pair of arms twined around Lestat’s neck. The arms was white, ghostly white in a way that the moon’s pale shade appeared livelier, and the skin almost transparent as light, little as it was in this dark room, passed right through to the flesh and bone. However, they were undeniably beautiful as they were grievously lacking: where the hands should be to complete this eerie artwork were only two blood-crusted lumps.

Lestat stared into the hideous lumps as if he could witness blood, warm and liquid, drip from them again. “Tell me what’s happening to him, Nicki,” he demanded.

“How should I know? Don’t ask me.”

The chuckling voice sounded clear and melodious yet it was edged with a clammy chill so familiar to the depth of Gaia’s bosoms.

The blunt ends of the arms touched the skin of Lestat’s neck, lingering, caressing, yearning for the prominent blue vein underneath. He felt damp and sticky and an unearthly warmth, despite the blood had long gone dry.

“Don’t play with me, please, Nicki.” He was close to pleading. “Drink me as much as you like, drain me if you so wish to, but please tell me. Only you know what’s happenening.”

A low chuckle. “Me? Really? Why don’t you ‘consult’ your precious, admirable Marius-Know-All?”

“Nicki…”

A snigger. Then it was on his skin again, the damp, sticky warmth, lowering his collar, baring his slender neck to a pair of gleaming fangs.

He felt his skin torn and blood, the essence of his kind, being drawn to a frozen cavern framed by lips as cold as ice.

Pain and pleasure danced madly together. The rapture of the bite was eternal, the following swoon inevitable; still, soon as he plunged himself into the center of it like each and every vampire would, it turned to nightmare.

The blazing red of the flame burnt into his vision. He squeezed his eyes shut. But even when so, he could still see its furious rhythm behind his eyelids. It was scalding. It hurt, hurt so much. Pained and horrified he was beyond the limits of words.

And the most horrifying of it all, Nicolas’s insane laughter which sounded akin to cry.

Nicki made him experience the final moment of his short life over and over every time he sank his ghostly teeth into Lestat’s artery. Lestat, feel it! Feel the most horrendous torture of being kissed by fire. Feel its blaze consume your body and ravage your soul. Feel it, for I felt it, in your abandonment, your absence. If only you had been more patient, more forgiving. If only you had stayed. If only you had returned.

Nicolas never said these words. He needed not. Lestat’s agony had conveyed it all.

Lestat sobbed and wept like a broken child. When Nicolas’s fangs withdrew from his vein, he roared and broke into a litany of miserable apologies.

Cradling him, Nicolas soothed him, tenderly as a mother to her spoiled son. The blood didn’t warm his embrace; nor did it give some life to his lips and tongue while he kissed and licked away Lestat’s blood tears. Blood could bring life to this form no more, not even an imitation of it, wasted as it flowed one-way into oblivion.

For this being Lestat called ‘Nicki’ wasn’t living, mortal or vampire, and this form, this ghostly form, was merely a persistent shadow of its former self, anchored to the world by the curse of its blood.

“It’s alright, my love, I forgave you long, long ago.”

Then what was the meaning of this endless cycle of torment? Yet Lestat never asked. He deserved all of them, all of Nicki’s rage and cruelty for leaving him behind when he had needed him the most. If it was a penance for his sins, if it could bring peace to Nicki, then…

“Please tell me,” Lestat beseeched him, his eyes crimson from the tears he had shed. He clung onto Nicolas’s form as though he himself was the ghost and Nicki the strong, powerful and living immortal. “Marius doesn’t know anything about this. He has never experienced it. Only I have. Nicki, please…”

Fingers, elegantly long and delicate, gathered the blood tears on their skin. Nicolas brought his hands to his lips and began licking at the leftover blood, savoring each scarce drop like a true worshipper.

This illusion, though couldn’t be brought back to life with blood as could a vampire, could be ‘fed’ and ‘fixed’ to a sight more preferable to the eyes that were allowed to lay upon it. For instance, the restoration of severed limbs.

“What can you do about it once you know?”

The violinist’s hands were on his gaunt throat, closing about it as if meant to crush, frail as it was now.

What can you do about me?

The fingers hovered just above his throat like a butterfly, absently touched his skin with carelessly deliberate flaps.

Lestat remained silent, his body trembling under Nicolas’s ministrations.

This body was a violin and Nicki the violinist. The Divine Violinist with the hands of Lucifer’s.

What can I do about you, Nicki? Beside yielding to your vengeance and wanton desires?

My personal Hell.

“Nothing,” he answered tiredly, at last, “absolutely nothing.”

“Then you’d better not know,” Nicolas cooed. “You’re exhausted and starving. Why don’t you go out, into the night and hunt to your full glory,  _mon lion_?”

“I’ll go and hunt, that I will,” he said with resolution, “but I want the answer first, Nicki.”

A ghostly sigh.

“Just like you, huh? Never giving up before getting what you want. Alright, I’ll tell you. She’s no stranger to you. She who was the china doll you carved out of death, your Oedipal daughter.”

Lestat stared at his lover, his sunken eyes wide and speaking of immense horror, as though only now did he realize his ghostly state, and was so appalled by it that time and space stood still, encasing him in an eternal echo of his silent, muted scream.

“That shocked expression doesn’t become you, my love. She was a vampire, wasn’t she? You know so well when we die, there’s only one choice for us.”

“Why Louis…? Why Louis…? Why… not me?”

His frame was shaking like a dry leaf ravaged by strong gale. Nicolas embraced him, keeping him still.

“Then answer me, why am I here, with you and not someone else? Not Eleni, Laurent or Felix. Not even my merciless tormenter Armand.”

Because you hate me. The same as Claudia hated me when she slashed my throat.

He bit his lips.

Nicolas’s fingers, nails trimmed and glossy as his own, traced the contours of his face. “Lestat oh Lestat, how your negative thoughts prick at my phantom heart.”

He turned Lestat’s face so that his dark eyes, two portals to unfathomable darkness vanquishing all radiance, bored into Lestat’s.

He was forever terrified by Nicki’s darkness, the vast nothingness that consumed everything of life.

“It’s love,  _mon amour_. Love ties us to you, granting us a place in this world we no longer belong while we could be aimless, scattered apparitions waiting restlessly for the End of day. Who would I have but you? Who would she have but him?”

“Love…” he mumbled. “Is it so?”

“It is so.”

“If it is love that she holds, why has she been torturing him?”

“Torturing?” Nicolas chuckled, wryly. “Your penchant for dramatization never ceases to amaze me, my love. Has your beloved Louis been suffering? Has he been harmed?”

“He’s been in pain for God-know-how-long!”

“A small, bearable discomfort,” Nicolas corrected. “No more than what you’ve gotten from me. Probably less.”

Lestat shuddered at the thought Nicolas’s inferno. What vision had Claudia been showing Louis? Could it be the deadly sun that had reduced her lovely petit form to ash and dust? Could it be whatever that had caused her blood to drench her dress?

“She couldn’t help it, just as I couldn’t help it. We long for life even in death. We find relief from the vitality and memory of the living, without which we’re forever in pain. Whatever causes pain to the living will be multiplied tenfold in us…”

As he spoke, his frame began quivering, losing focus like a bad-signal image.

“Nicki…”

He took Nicolas in his arms, relishing in the joy that he was still able to touch Nicki, that Nicki had yet to become an incorporeal thought, a trick of light.

“Louis doesn’t know about Claudia,” he said. “If he was aware of her presence, he would never have complained; he would have been…”

“…silently enduring her, right?” Nicolas finished for him. “The same way you’ve been enduring me?”

More acid on his tongue, just like back at the  _Théâtre des Vampires._ His eyes were simmering, the blood tears threatening to burst out any moment. Vulnerable, Lestat thought. Frail. Yet every bit alluring. The Nicolas of his young heart. His first and earnest love. His first and greatest regret.

“To tell the truth, Nicki,” he said, cradling Nicolas’s head, “I prefer your torment, inevitable as it is, than never knowing what has become of you, of your soul. Heaven? Hell? Or someplace reserved only for us damned creatures? And what would await us there, which of us could tell? The possibility that you could be suffering is greater a torture than the knowledge of your suffering, I swear.”

He felt Nicolas’s smile against the fabric on his shoulder.

“What will you do about her?”

“Should I not tell Louis? Should he not be allowed at least to know?”

“Then what? Tell him about me. Let him know you’ve been hosting a wraith for decades before your reunion?”

Nicolas laughed. Dry, hollow.

“Now he’s the same, only his wraith is the little girl whose demise he could never forgive himself? Pardon me if I say that will not sit well with his gentle heart and guilt-ridden, fragile soul. He may drive himself to the sun…”

“Stop it! Please, Nicki!”

Nicolas’s eyes were dark and his gaze cold. Nevertheless, he said not another word.

A moment stretched between them, long as eternity yet quick as sand through fingers, before Lestat asked, “How does she look?”

“You want to know whether she looks like me when I first appeared to your eyes? A pile of ash grudgingly put in human shape?”

Silence. Eyes wide. Hurt.

The look in Nicolas’s gaze softened.

“Like a doll, Lestat, the way you created her to be.” His voice came gentler, less acid. “But does it matter really, her appearance, as she is now?”

“No, Nicki,” he answered. “yet it puts me at peace, lessens my guilt in some way.”

“Egoism of a man.” A pause. “I love you for that.”

“And loathe me for that.”

Nicolas smiled, cupping his face with both hands. “Yes, _loathed_  you for that. Now, go out and hunt, my beloved. You’re weak. Don’t bother yourself with Claudia’s presence. Just our little family increases by one.  _Our_  princess daughter.”

Lestat sighed, feeling drained to the core, which wasn’t very far from truth. Nicki had always been a voracious eater. So, no Gentleman Death in silk and lace tonight, only a starving beast with its bestial lust, he thought with sarcasm. Though his knees could give out under him any moment, he asked, “You’re not going with me?”

Nicolas looked him up and down, a mischievous light gleaming in his dark pupils. “Much as I love to watch you hunt, it’s a crime to make you carry me in this state.”

“You’re underestimating me,  _mon ami_.”

He felt grateful nevertheless.

“The moon looks gorgeous tonight and she insists that I play for her compliment. Better not to waste these hands while I have them, right?”

He contemplated his hands, the delicate outlines of which coated in silvery moonlight, intently as if watching a painting in the Louvre.

“Beware of Louis,” Lestat reminded. “He usually comes home early.”

“Not to worry, love.”

Nicolas kissed him soundlessly on the lips.

…

“What a spectacle you present, little girl.”

Nicolas’s fingers fondled the lacquered body of a violin, willed to this world by the vitality in Lestat’s blood. This violin – the Stradivarius – had been his and like its master, it had been broken beyond repair. But perhaps it was for the better. He couldn’t imagine any other instruments could sing better his songs of doom.

Tiny sounds of tiny footsteps. The darkness in front of him seemed to move. From it a little figure gingerly revealed herself in tattered taffeta and lace. Her head hung strangely on her twisted neck, a doll’s head suffered the hands of a cruel child. Her eyes were also like a doll’s, wide and glassy, as she stared at him.

“No wonder you choose not to reveal yourself.” Nicolas smirked. “You could scare him to Hell.”

She kept staring, unfazed by his taunts.

“Still no talking?” A sigh. “And I thought you were finally fed up with silence and wanted to converse.”

“You’re not the best conversationalist, you know.”

Her voice was rasp with an enmity too large for her petit form to contain. She wasn’t trying to, either.

“ _Oui._ The only one you have, by the way.”

He studied her, briefly. “I’m curious as to why you never take enough to restore that doll-esque beauty of yours, only a nibble now and then.”

“Sorry if my appetite disturbs you, but it isn’t your business.”

“Of course it isn’t,” he said. The violin had been fixed on his shoulders. In his hand a bow manifested. “Then certainly you don’t mind my telling Lestat?”

“What can he do?” Claudia’s chuckles were ringing like bells. Hell’s Bells if Lestat were to hear them.

“Exorcism, perhaps?”

“And Louis would let him?” She laughed. “The truth is, Louis can’t escape me, no more than my dark father can escape you.”

“I’m glad at least we have something in common,” he laughed with her. “We’ve been so distant while we should be the closet to one another on this earth.”

“Actually we have more in common than you may have realized. That we loathe sharing what we deem ours, for instance.”

“Do I?” His tone was edged with mischief.

“Uh huh.”

Nicolas’s laughter echoed. “Claudia, oh lovely Claudia. You should have been  **my** daughter instead of Lestat’s. The altruistic side in him can’t do anything but share.”

“And what’s been taking you so long to take action?”

“After you, my never-to-be daughter.”

He faked a bow.

Her pale doll eyes locked gaze with his dark ones. A sense of unspoken mutual understanding was conveyed.

“Well,” she breathed softly, out of habit, “I only want to make sure that I have an ally instead of an obstacle. I don’t like things that upset my plan.”

“What could be the goal of such plan, Claudia dearest? Another wraith to cling to Lestat, invading my territory?”

“That’d be too convenient for Lestat, wouldn’t it? No, my ultimate goal isn’t such. Only in that state could I truly have him, free and unfettered by the bewitching spell of my dark father.”

“You’re certain you can wrench him from Lestat?”

Claudia’s marble-white lips curved up. “Did I ever tell you that I’ve always had a way with Louis? No matter dead or alive.”

“That I never doubt, Claudia,” he said. The bow in his hand slid swiftly against the strings. The first note shrieked. Frowning just a little, he turned to face her. “You wasted a precious night with your beloved Louis just so you could talk to me? I’m surprised.”

“Like I said, I want things clear between us and my plan undisturbed.”

“What would you have done if I had proven to be an obstacle, little china doll?”

“Why do you care when you aren’t?” She replied with a smile on her small mouth, a true smile this time, which softened her eerie countenance. “We know each other well,  _Devil_  Violinist.”

He returned the courtesy with his own.

“Would you care for a song from this Devil Violinist, my fair lady?”

“Save them for my dark father,” she said, “for I have no need for your music.”

Her voice trailing behind, she walked with her head oddly angled, retreating to the darkness from which she’d emerged. Her steps and posture were graceful beyond expectation.

Nicolas watched her until her figure vanished entirely. Leaning against the wall, he began sawing. The voice of the Stradivarius was divinely dark as it resonated through the large house, empty but for the pair of ghosts.

_End_

**Author's Note:**

> Some elements, like Lestat’s remark “You look dreadful” and Louis’s mention of “two Lucifer’s angels on the loose”, were drawn from the musical.
> 
> My inspiration came from Evanescence’s My Immortal and the horror movie Shutter.


End file.
